Davis Love III to Redesign Sea Pines Resort’s Ocean Course

Davis Love III to Redesign Sea Pines Resort’s Ocean Course

Golfing great Davis Love III, who has won a record five Heritage titles, is now renovating Hilton Head Island’s oldest golf course — Sea Pines’ Ocean Course.

All those years Davis Love III was winning a record five RBC Heritage titles, the PGA Tour veteran was getting to know Harbour Town Golf Links and Sea Pines Resort at Hilton Head Island. Now he’s applying his architect’s touch to a redesign of Sea Pines’ Ocean Course.

Love Golf Design, run by the professional golfer and his brother (and sometimes caddie) Mark Love, have been hired by Sea Pines to update and upgrade the oldest golf course on Hilton Head Island. The Ocean Course opened in 1962 and was originally created by George Cobb.

Another former PGA Tour player, Mark McCumber, renovated the course in 1995, but since then Sea Pines has performed numerous upgrades of Harbour Town, while architect Pete Dye (who teamed with Jack Nicklaus in 1969 to do Harbour Town) totally revamped the resort’s former Marsh Course, creating Heron Point by Pete Dye.

The Ocean Course will closed in October 2015 and will reopen as Atlantic Dunes in October 2016. The redesign by the Love brothers is part of a continuing major investment by the resort in its golf courses.

The Dye team recently made changes to Heron Point, which reopened for play in September 2014, softening the green surrounds and contours for playability by resort guests, as well as enlarging several greens and resurfacing all the greens with Tif-Eagle, a Bermuda hybrid grass.

Harbour Town also will be getting an upcoming facelift, scheduled for summer 2015 after the RBC Heritage. Fairways will be re-grassed with Celebration Bermuda, and greens will be reseeded with Tif-Eagle. Additionally, the course’s irrigation system will be replaced.

After the 2014 Heritage, Sea Pines razed and rebuilt the Harbour Town clubhouse; earlier, the resort had built a new Plantation Clubhouse and added a beach club. All properties were opened by fall 2014.

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The genius of the Ocean course is not its difficulty so much as Dye’s ability to make it appear even tougher than it is. He built it immediately after Hurricane Hugo and incorporated elements with the land and marsh for a totally unique course.